Stop Saying Entropy is Disorder

Joseph Mellor
15 min readOct 4, 2020

We misunderstand entropy because we’re taught it’s a measure of disorder, but the real definition of entropy is far more useful and intuitive.

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

Look, I get it. You can’t throw a textbook at someone with no formal understanding of statistical mechanics when they ask a question. An answer that someone cannot understand is worth as much to them as no answer at all. Even taking this fact into account, you

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Joseph Mellor

BS in Physics, Math, and CS with a minor in High-Performance Computing. You can find all my articles at https://josephmellor.xyz/articles/.